Katyn, the latest film by veteran Polish movie maker Andrzej Wajda, will be Polands candidate for Best Foreign Film in next years Academy Awards. Katyn  which had its premier last week in Warsaw  tells the story of the massacre by over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940.

Some of Wajdas family were murdered during the massacre.

Wajdas latest movie was among 16 Polish films which a special committee had to chose from to send to the Academy in Los Angles for consideration for nomination in the Best Foreign Film category.

In 2000 Wajda was presented with an honorary Oscar for his numerous contributions to cinema.

His epic about the Solidarity strikes, Man of Iron, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981. Three of Wajda's worksThe Promised Land, The Maids of Wilko, and Man of Ironhave been nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Wajdas Katyn is more than a historical record, it is a personal statement.

Comment by English Editor Aleksander Kropiwnicki

The film "Katyn" by Andrzej Wajda, the leading Polish director, will be certainly found as one of the best and most important movies created by this artist.

He is the senior among Polish film directors but is it really his last bow, as he suggests himself? Hopefully not. Its hard to imagine a man finishing his career when being in such a good shape.

It would be good to enjoy Wajdas art and, at the same time, to think again about the tragic events of 1940 without distraction. Unfortunately, we are being distracted. Constantly.

It was so many years ago and, as Lech Kaczynski, the Polish President, rightly pointed out during his visit in Katyn last Monday, none of the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre are now alive. We, the Poles, are not blaming contemporary Russia for what the Soviet security service, the NKVD, did to at least 15 thousand Polish military officers in the spring of 1940. However, its impossible to forget that the Polish war prisoners were shot dead just because they had refused to co-operate with the Soviet aggressors of 1939. Its impossible not to call it a murder. Its impossible not to notice that the Kremlin firmly refuses to accept that the Katyn massacre was genocide.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia, after a decade of some more honest historic policy, is quickly coming back to falsifying history. Some journalists and school-books simply ignore the Katyn crime. Some still claim that the murder was committed by the Nazi Germans. Some, last but not least, admit that the Poles were executed by the Soviet authorities and are likely to defend and praise that murder as the victims were supposedly "capitalists and enemies of the USSR". No one expects Russia to blame itself endlessly but why to deny obvious facts and why to defend the crime at the same time? Isnt it typical double-thinking, predicted by Orwell in his "1984"?

Some Russian politicians and columnists want to balance the Katyn murder by claiming that in 1920 dozens of thousands of Soviet war prisoners were killed in "the Polish concentration camps". This accusation is repeated despite all explanations that in 1920 Poland, like most of European countries, was suffering a typhus epidemic which killed a huge number of people, including, yes, at least two dozens of the Soviet war prisoners. None of them were killed, though, and "the Polish concentration camps" simply didnt exist. Moreover, almost the same number of soldiers of the aggressive Red Army, taken prisoners when attacking Warsaw, voluntarily joined the Polish Army and ended up on the Polish side soon after. One could hardly expect them to do so if they were not properly treated.

My suspicion is that those who use this false accusation as an argument against recognizing the Katyn massacre as an act of genocide, perfectly know that they are lying. They know and they dont, at the same time. In the name of Great Russia, which is always right and always clean, her sons apparently can and are supposed to lie. Sometimes thinking about this superpower state, so close to Poland in many ways  like culture, poetry, sense of humor  makes one feeling helpless.

That is because the left blamed the Nazis for it. Then when the left found out that one of thier heros did it, then it was hushed up...
And besides, it was only 20,000 poles, right.Hell, Stalin killed that many before lunch.

8
posted on 09/23/2007 11:55:07 AM PDT
by Yorlik803
( When are we going to draw a line a say"this far and no farther")

The actor who's sitting on the jeep plays a role of an officer, who at first had been a POW in a Soviet camp - together with the rest of his colleagues, who got murdered in Katyn. These are pictures showing him at that time (with a lieutenant insignia on his shoulders)

But later he turned out to be one of the very few officers, who decided to collaborate with the Soviets. Owing to that he saved his life and became a major.

And here you can see him as a major of pro-Soviet Polish Army in 1944 or 1945 (visiting the wife of his friend, who had fallen in Katyn)

21
posted on 09/23/2007 1:51:50 PM PDT
by lizol
(Liberal - a man with his mind open ... at both ends)

As you know, unlike the armies of most countries, the Polish officer corps in World War II was composed of the leading men of Polish society - judges, intellectuals, professors, political leaders and the like. This has always been a tradition of the Poles.

By murdering these men, Stalin and his minions were setting up the remaining Poles for total enslavement, in perpetuity.

Fortunately, the Poles being the Poles, eventually, a Man of Iron would come along, and upset the Soviet applecart in Poland...

26
posted on 09/23/2007 3:41:13 PM PDT
by an amused spectator
(AGW: If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a research lab, you never know what you'll find)

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